tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732662769765511163.post6298638179160162419..comments2023-07-31T11:06:29.485+02:00Comments on Transition: Vladimir Popov replies on ChinaD. Mario Nutihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17319653816487296802noreply@blogger.comBlogger3125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732662769765511163.post-53468614585482347202010-12-27T17:59:23.200+01:002010-12-27T17:59:23.200+01:00If we just look at economic performance during the...If we just look at economic performance during the Mao years, and GDP, then China's performance is more or less the equal of India's, or perhaps not quite as good.<br /><br />However GDP is not the only story.<br /><br />When it comes to life expectancy and literacy, by any measure, China dramatically outperformed India during the Maoist years. My own wife born in 1966, comes from a very poor village in rural Guandong. The whole family shared a bed in a single tiny room. The poverty was appalling. However in spite of this she had a happy childhood. She had free basic medical care (she still has her vaccination certificates), and received 10 years free basic education to the point where she is completely numerate and literate. <br /><br />Literacy increased from under 20% in 1949 to 70 to 80% in 1976. In India literacy is even today only about 60% - compared to well over 90% in China now (half of Indian women cannot read or write). <br /><br />Mao doubled life expectancy - the most dramatic increase in life expectancy in history happened under Mao, and I would like to bring to your attention a current Stanford study on this:<br />http://tinyurl.com/2gycydx<br /><br />In fact it is self evident. The fastest rate of population growth in China's history happened under Mao, with the population doubling. No one disputes this. Yet this happened during a time of falling fertility (refer work by Judith Banister). What then explains the population growth? The only explanation is a dramatic lowering of mortality.<br /><br />In fact, in spite of starting off from similar conditions in the late 1940s, by 1976, the year of Mao's death, life expectancy in China was already higher than what it is in India today.<br />http://tinyurl.com/2fuhovw<br /><br /><br />Furthermore another study (Harvard University) makes a compelling cast that China over the past 30 years has outperformed India because Maoist China prepared an excellent foundation of a healthy and literate (for a developing country of low GDP) population for Deng’s reforms to take place.<br /><br />This is an excerpt from the article:<br /><br />“However, the authors note, China’s economy has exploded, expanding by 8.1 percent per capita per year on average between 1980 and 2000, while in the same time period India saw a sustained growth rate in income per capita of 3.6 percent–a rate that, while rapid by the standards of most developing economies, is modest compared to China’s.<br /><br />What accounts for the difference? Part of the answer, the HSPH team suggests, is that dramatic demographic changes in China began decades before those in India. After 1949, China’s Maoist government invested heavily in basic health care, creating communal village and township clinics for its huge rural population. That system produced enormous improvements in health: From 1952 to 1982, infant mortality in China dropped from 200 to 34 deaths per 1,000 live births. Life expectancy rose from 35 years to 68.”<br /><br />http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/review/rvw_summerfall06/rvwsf06_bloom.html<br /><br /><br />Yet if we read not only what most academics and the media says in the West, but also what many Chinese government officials themselves say, one would believe that Mao's China was a complete unmitigated disaster in which nothing good happened. I would say the truth is not as simple as this.Markhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05190389211375842766noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732662769765511163.post-1516855753942589842010-08-04T00:51:57.648+02:002010-08-04T00:51:57.648+02:00“But the right to strike is really not guaranteed ...“But the right to strike is really not guaranteed by Deng’s constitution, although it was guaranteed by Mao’s constitution “<br /><br />But was Mao’s constitution (alike Stalin’s constitution in USSR) anything more than a propaganda tract? Did really Mao really guarantee the right to strike?<br /><br /><br />"By the way, the relative popularity of Mao and Deng in China today could be measured by observing the numbers at the memorial site where people can go and put virtual flowers to personalities they like: http://jidian.china.com Since 2009 and until July 8, 2010, Mao got over 2 million bouquets of flowers, Deng – only 33,000, less than Zhou Enlai (nearly 200,000"<br /><br />This comparison is all to the advantage of Deng, the real father of present China economic success following his dismantling of the Maoist economic system. The popularity of Mao is the direct consequence of his personality cult. In this Mao’s popularity in China parallels Stalin’s popularity in Russia. Both of them certainly would have been dwarfed by the popularity that Hitler would have enjoyed in Germany had he, like Stalin and Mao, won the war instead of losing it.<br /><br />"Well, I would stick to what I said – there was life before democracy, which emerged at a very late stage of human history."<br /><br />Indeed, starvation too was endemic in great part of human history, as well as wars of aggression and conquest, widespread torture, intolerance, mass killing of people of different ethnicity, religion, political convictions. But this is not a reason why we should approve or condone all this, as well as ruthless dictatorshipa, such as Mao’s, or Stalin’s or Hitler’s, in the modern world.<br /><br />As to the nature of the present economic and political system it is Popov who misses my point. My point is that the nature of the political and economic system of present day China can be assimilated to the different kinds of South East Asian authoritarian regimes which have thrived and led to prosperity their countries before post-Maoist China: politically authoritarian nationalistic regimes, economically mixed marked economies, with a lot of steering by the state. Certainly the economic system of present day China cannot be said to be a communist one, and it is much closer to the South East Asian authoritarian model than to the economic institutions of Maoist China.<br /><br />"According to Maddison (2008), Chinese per-capita GDP was about 70 percent of India’s in 1950, rose to about 100 percent by 1958-59, fell during the Great Leap Forward, rose again to 100 percent of the Indian level by 1966, fell during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, and rose again to 100 percent by 1978."<br /><br />This does not seem a great performance, owing to the fact that Mao inherited a country devastated by a long period of war and that the post-war performance of post-war India, before the recent liberalization away from the original Soviet-like model of concentration on heavy industry directed by the state was far from satisfactory.<br /><br />"By 2006, it was more than twice the Indian per capita GDP."<br /><br />Indeed this took place after the demolition of Mao’s economic institutions (starting with Mao’s communes) following Deng’s reforms. This is made quite evident from the graph relating to the comparison between India and China’s performances.Alberto Chilosihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12828399339428431918noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8732662769765511163.post-25837578482502298442010-07-24T01:16:17.815+02:002010-07-24T01:16:17.815+02:00In my opinion your rebuttal is more forceful, cons...In my opinion your rebuttal is more forceful, consistent and illuminating than your original post, with which I had many issues...both of a factual and analytical nature.<br /><br />AshokAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com